The Cathars were a religious group who appeared in Europe in the
eleventh century, their origins
something of a mystery though there is reason to believe their ideas
came from Persia or the Byzantine Empire, by way of the Balkans
and Northern Italy. Records from the Roman Catholic Church
mention them under various
names and in various places. Catholic theologians debated
with themselves for centuries whether Cathars were Christian heretics
or whether they were not Christians at all. The question is
apparently still open. Roman Catholics still refer to Cathar belief
as "the Great Heresy" though the official Catholic position
is that Catharism is not Christian at all.

The religion flourished in an area often referred to as the Languedoc,
broadly bordered by the Mediterannean Sea, the Pyrenees, and the
rivers Garonne, Tarn and Rhône - and corresponding to
the new French region of Occitanie (or the old French regions
of Languedoc-Roussillon
and Midi-Pyrénées)

As Dualists,
Cathars believed in two principles, a good god and his evil adversary
(much like God and Satan of mainstream Christianity). The good principle
had created everything immaterial (good, permanent, immutable) while
the bad principle had created everything material (bad, temporary,
perishable). Cathars called themselves simply Christians;
their neighbours distinguished them as "Good
Christians". The Catholic Church called them Albigenses,
or less frequently. Cathars.

Cathars maintained a Church
hierarchy and practiced a range of
ceremonies, but rejected any idea of priesthood or the use of
church buildings. They divided into ordinary
believers who led ordinary medieval lives and an inner
Elect of Parfaits (men) and Parfaites (women) who led extremely
ascetic lives yet still worked for their living - generally in itinerant
manual trades like weaving. Cathars believed in reincarnation
and refused
to eat meat or other animal products. They were strict about
biblical injunctions - notably those about living in poverty, not
telling lies, not killing and not swearing oaths.

Basic
Cathar Tenets led to some surprising logical implications.
For example they largely regarded men
and women as equals, and had no doctrinal objection to contraception,
euthanasia
or suicide.
In some respects the Cathar and Catholic Churches were polar opposites.
For example the Cathar Church taught that all non-procreative sex
was better than any procreative sex. The Catholic Church taught
- as it still teaches - exactly the opposite. Both positions produced
interesting results. Following their tenet, Catholics concluded
that masturbation was a far greater sin than rape (as mediaeval
penitentials confirm). Following their principles, Cathars could
deduce that sexual intercourse between man and wife was more culpable
than homosexual
sex. (Catholic propaganda on this supposed Cathar proclivity
gave us the word bugger, from Bougre,
one of the many names for medieval Gnostic Dualists)

In the Languedoc, known at the time for its high culture, tolerance
and liberalism, the Cathar religion took root and gained more and
more adherents during the twelfth century. By the early thirteenth
century Catharism was probably the majority religion in the area.
Many Catholic texts refer to the danger of it replacing Catholisism
completely.

Catharism was supported or at least tolerated by the nobility as
well as the common people. This was yet another annoyance to the
Roman Church which considered the feudal system to be divinely ordained
as the
Natural Order (Cathars disliked the feudal system because it
depended on oath taking). In open debates with leading Catholic
theologians Cathars seem to have come out on top. This was embarrassing
for the Roman Church, not least because they had fielded the best
professional preachers in Europe against what they saw as a collection
of uneducated weavers and other manual workers. A number of Catholic
priests had become Cathar adherents (Catharism was a religion that
seems to have appealed especially to the theologically literate).
Worse, the Catholic Church was being held up to public ridicule
(some of the richest men in Christendom, bejewelled, vested in finery,
and preaching poverty, provided an irresistible target even to contemporary
Catholics in the Languedoc). Worst yet, Cathars declined to pay
tithes to the Catholic Church. As one senior Churchman observed
of the Cathar movement "if
it had not been cut back by the swords of the faithful I think it
would have corrupted the whole of Europe."

The
Counts
of Toulouse and their allies
were dispossessed and humiliated, and their lands later annexed
to France. Educated and tolerant Languedoc rulers were replaced
by relative barbarians; Dominic Guzmán (later Saint
Dominic) founded the Dominican
Order. Within a few years the first papal Inquisition,
manned by the Dominicans,
was established explicitly to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance.

Persecutions of Languedoc
Jews and other minorities were initiated; the culture
of the troubadours
was lost as their cultured patrons were reduced to wandering refugees
known as faidits. Their characteristic concept of "paratge",
a whole sophisticated world-view, was almost destroyed, leaving
us a pale imitation in our idea of chivalry. Lay learning was discouraged
and the reading of the bible became a capital crime. Tithes were
enforced. The Languedoc started its long economic decline from the
richest region of Europe to become the poorest region in France;
and the language of the area, Occitan,
began its descent from the foremost literary language in Europe
to a regional dialect, disparaged by the French as a patois.

At the end of the extermination of the Cathars, the Roman Church
had proof that a sustained campaign of genocide can work. It also
had the precedent of an internal Crusade within Christendom, and
the machinery of the first modern police state that could be reconstructed
for the Spanish Inquisition, and again for later Inquisitions and
genocides. Chateaubriand referred to the crusade as "this
abominable episode of our history". Voltaire observed that
"there was never anything as unjust as the war against the
Albigensians".

Arguably
just as interesting, Protestant
ideas share much in common with Cathar ideas, and there is some
reason to believe that early reformers were aware of the Cathar
tradition. Even today some Protestant Churches claim a Cathar heritage.
Tantalisingly, weavers were commonly accused of spreading Protestant
ideas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, just as their antecedents
in the same trade had been accused of spreading Cathar ideas in
Medieval times.

It can even be argued that in many respects Roman
Catholic ideas have shifted over the centuries ever further
from the Church's medieval teaching and ever closer to Cathar teaching.

Pope
Innocent III excommunicates a group of Cathars. From the
fourteenth century, Chronique de France (Chronique de St Denis),
British Library, Royal 16, g VI f374v.

Defenseless Languedoc Cathars are cut down
by French Catholic Crusaders. From the fourteenth century
Chronique de France (Chronique de St Denis), British Library,
Royal 16, g VI f374v. This is the right hand side of a two
panel illustration (The left half is shown above). In this
panel The leading crusader can be identified by his coat of
arms as Simon
de Montfort .

The Battle
of Muret (1213), a turning point in the Cathar Crusade
depicted in Grandes Chroniques de France, Manuscript français
2813, fol. 252v. (created 1375-1380), in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France

Around 1250 Alphonse de Poitiers wrote to
Pope Innocent IV asking him to issue a bull against heresy.
This document is known in the form of a draft, on the back
of which is a sketch showing a man being burned at the stake.

The start of the Litury of the Consolamentum
from the Cathar Rituel in the Lyon MS.

Vestiges of "the Wall" - the Inquisition
prison at Carcassonne

Illustration from the illuminated manuscript
Grandes Chroniques de France depicting the burning of Amalrician
heretics before King Philip II of France. In the background
is the Gibbet of Montfaucon and, anachronistically, the Grosse
Tour of the Temple fortress. Jean Fouquet (1455-1460), Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris

A woman (allegorically representing the Gospel)
with a thunderbolt triumphing over Heresia (Heresy) and the
Serpent (Satan). Church of King Gustaf Vasa, Stockholm, Sweden,
sculpture by Burchard Precht.

Arnaud
Amaury, other Cistercian abbots and St-Dominic.
(with a halo) crush helpless Cathars underfoot - a sanitised
version of the persecution of the Cathars

Torture museum in in the Logis de l'Inquisition
- the old Dominican house in Carcassonne

Memorial at Minerve
where 140 - 180 Cathars were burned alive for disagreeing
with Catholic theology.

Raymond VI by Jean-Paul Laurens, c 1920. The picture represents
the spirit of independance of Occitan civilisation (for no obvious
reason this picture has been withdrawn from public display in
the Salle des Illustres in the Capitol, Toulouse.

Eastern (Uyghur) Manichaeans
writing (with panel inscription in Sogdian). 8th or 9th century
Manuscript from Gaochang, on the northern rim of the Taklamakan
Desert in what is now Xinjiang, China (up to the nineteenth
century Cathars were thought to be Manichaeans)

The Languedoc Cross (from the armourial bearings
of the Counts of Toulouse). Often erroneously referred to
as the "Cathar Cross"

The Languedoc Cross (from the armourial bearings
of the Counts of Toulouse) may be seen everywhere in the Languedoc

The Cathar New Testament - Lyon MS

Saint
Augustine of Hippo - an ex Manichaean
Sometimes called the "Father of the Inquisition",
debating about death of living creatures with the Manichaeans
(Augustine, La Cité de Dieu, Books I-X (translation
from the Latin by Raoul de Presles), Paris, Maître François
(illuminator); c. 1475-1480. Volume II: Nantes, BM, fr. 8
Fol. 25r, Book 1, 20)

An arresting modern way of stating the principal
dualistic teaching of the Cathars.

"Nothing is more cruel to the past than
the commonplace according to which force is unable to destroy
spiritual values; according to this opinion, the existence
of civilizations effaced by the violence of arms is denied.
One may without fear deny the dead. One kills a second time
what has perished, and associates oneself with the cruelty
of arms."

Detail from Blanche of Castile and King Louis
IX of France in the Bible moralisée de Tolède,
dite bible de Saint-Louis, scène de dédicace,
circa 1220-1230, The Morgan Library & Museum, Accession
number M240